How to Win at Roulette by Arnold Snyder 2013

The most surprising thing for a blackjack player about the transition to roulette is the culture shock. Blackjack has had a few staid decades now since the transition to corporate casinos and shoe games and auto-peek devices. (It’s getting less staid again with all the new hand-held games that have been launched since the invention of bad payouts on naturals).

But roulette is like going back to the days when dealers peeked and Mickey MacDougall had to be at the table to protect Thorp from card mechanics. The thing to remember is that those were also the golden days before Beat the Dealer had been published, when the handful of people who had figured out how to beat the game had the opportunities all to themselves.

One way that roulette differs from modern blackjack is that at most U.S. casinos there is either no fixed dealing procedure for the game, or whatever procedure is in place is never enforced, except when it comes to payouts. Casinos are universally strict about procedures for roulette payouts. But everything else is up for grabs.

In recent weeks of looking at roulette in Las Vegas, I’ve seen dealers who were clearly trying to aim for players give the ball less than three spins. Most dealers have been giving the no-more-bets wave 3 to 4 spins from the time the ball falls off the wheel track, but it hasn’t been unusual to see dealers waving off bets ten or twelve spins out, even when big action players are still trying to get their bets onto the layout.

Ed Thorp on Dealer Signature and Steering

Ed Thorp addresses Kimmel’s dealer signature article in the roulette chapter of his book, The Mathematics of Gambling (Gambling Times, 1984). He writes that for dealer signature to be exploitable three factors must be consistent from spin to spin: rotor speed, ball revolutions, and the position of the rotor at ball launch.

Thorp also provides a formula for statistical analysis of roulette that has since become key in the arguments of all gambling experts who maintain that dealer steering and signature cannot occur. Thorp instructs analysts to gather data on the number of revolutions the ball makes between release and crossing onto the rotor, and to state the results as the “average number of revolutions plus an error term.”

Next, the analyst should count the number of revolutions the rotor makes during each of these ball spins, and again compute the average number of revolutions, plus a second error term. Finally, Thorp instructs roulette analysts to “count how far the ball travels on the rotor after it has crossed the divider between the rotor and the stator.” These results should again be summarized as an average distance (in pockets or revolutions) plus an error term.

To tie it all together, Thorp says that for a dealer’s “signature” to be exploitable, “it is necessary that the square root of the sums of the squares of the error terms be less than 17 pockets.” In other words, if the dealer’s average ball spin is 10 revolutions, plus or minus 10 pockets, and his average rotor spin during each ball spin is six revolutions, plus or minus 19 pockets, and the average ball roll is 19 pockets, plus or minus 19 pockets, you square each error term and add them up: (10 x 10) + (19 x 19) + (19 x 19) = 100 + 361 + 361 = 822. Now take the square root of 822, which is 28.7.

Thorp provides a table that shows the rate of return given various root mean square errors ("Typical Error E"). This table is reproduced below. If you look at Thorp’s table, a Typical Error E of 28-29 pockets would have you betting at a disadvantage of 5.26% (the house edge on an American wheel) if you were trying to exploit dealer signature in this situation.

Way too many variables. All it takes is for the dealer to think that the rotor has slowed down enough to warrant giving it an extra nudge to send you back to square one. A fun book about a team trying to beat the wheel with a computer is The Eudaemonic Pie by Thomas Bass.

Master of the Wheel

"Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo ... is known as the first person to actually be victorious in exploiting the roulette wheel. He was certainly not the first person who thought that casino roulette wheels were bias, but he was the first person to successfully prove it.

"Gonzalo had his eldest son, Ivan and his eldest daughter, Vanessa to record data on different roulette wheels across Madrid. In 1991, they started officially playing and less than a year later, they had accumulated over $700,000. Because of this, many casinos in the area forbid them from playing and one casino even tried to sue the family, but Spain's Supreme Court luckily ruled in their favor.

"The court didn't deem studying the wheel and using a computer to determine when to bet illegal at all. Instead, they said it was wise to make an educated guess as to where the marble might drop based on imperfections of the casino's own wheels.

"Although Gonzalo was happy to hear the court overruled the charges against him, he decided to stop playing at casinos in Spain and instead headed to Las Vegas to try his methods out over there. Gonzalo and his family took precautions to blend in as tourists and ensure the same staff didn't see them at the tables too many times in a row.

"It wasn't long before word got out about Gonzalo and his unique strategies though, and soon everyone recognized him and his family as the people that overcame the roulette wheel. With this fame came more and more controversy and more and more casinos refusing to let them gamble in their facilities. The family had made over $2 million from the casinos of Las Vegas before deciding to retire."

"Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo ... is known as the first person to actually be victorious in exploiting the roulette wheel. He was certainly not the first person who thought that casino roulette wheels were bias, but he was the first person to successfully prove it.

"Gonzalo had his eldest son, Ivan and his eldest daughter, Vanessa to record data on different roulette wheels across Madrid. In 1991, they started officially playing and less than a year later, they had accumulated over $700,000. Because of this, many casinos in the area forbid them from playing and one casino even tried to sue the family, but Spain's Supreme Court luckily ruled in their favor.

"The court didn't deem studying the wheel and using a computer to determine when to bet illegal at all. Instead, they said it was wise to make an educated guess as to where the marble might drop based on imperfections of the casino's own wheels.

"Although Gonzalo was happy to hear the court overruled the charges against him, he decided to stop playing at casinos in Spain and instead headed to Las Vegas to try his methods out over there. Gonzalo and his family took precautions to blend in as tourists and ensure the same staff didn't see them at the tables too many times in a row.

"It wasn't long before word got out about Gonzalo and his unique strategies though, and soon everyone recognized him and his family as the people that overcame the roulette wheel. With this fame came more and more controversy and more and more casinos refusing to let them gamble in their facilities. The family had made over $2 million from the casinos of Las Vegas before deciding to retire."

Computer-aided Roulette Prediction

Hidden Devices That Predict Where The Ball Will Land.
The Quickest, Easiest and Most Effective Method To Beat Roulette.

Roulette computers are hidden electronic devices that predict where the ball will land. They calculate the speed and deceleration of ball and wheel to determine the approximate winning wheel sector. They are by far the quickest and most effective way to beat roulette. But as with my physics roulette system, understand they are not magic and cannot beat every wheel. However, they beat most wheels.